Greene without God

...In that mystery Greene includes all that give themselves in sacrifice for someone loved, all who dying like the whiskey-priest 'know now that there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint.'" It is at this point that critics who don't share Greene's religious beliefs desert him...

...This is a book to be read by anyone interested in a novel of ideas, as well as those interested in the techniques of fiction...

...Our Man is a most familiar Greene figure...

...who was sentenced to jail for a murder he didn't commit and who after many years of imprisonment is released and returns to his native village...

...For the first time he has written a book that is, in an ironic, satirical way, rather funny...

...David Dempsey's All That Was Mortal (Dutton...

...As a fiction, therefore, The Secret of Luca strikes one as being neither subtle nor profound—and a bit of a bore...

...This is a disappointingly sentimental tale about a good peasant (are there any other kind...

...Unlike most "religious" writers, his diagnosis is extremely acute, whatever we may think of his treatment...

...Cosman is correct to suggest that "to Greene the appalling mystery...

...His most appealing characters are those irreligious souls who struggle to understand with their minds what their hearts keep hinting at...

...As Max Cosman has noted in that excellent little magazine, The Colorado Quarterly, the figures for whom and in whom God and devil struggle "are more apt to be publicans, harlots, lechers, criminals—seedy little people in general—than smug, self-assured Pharisees, starched in dress and in outlook...

...Capote is a masterful writer of sophisticated, cool prose, and Breakfast at Tiffany's is a lot of fun to read, but I don't think it is up to his earlier work...

...He presents a further critical problem by writing too well, or rather, too slickly...

...Its gist is that the winner gets to dictate the law to the losers, which means he can insult, vilify, and degrade them...

...Then the slut becomes a saint, the whiskey-befogged priest has a blinding insight into the meaning of life, or the salesman, instead of dying by an assassin's bullet, is allowed to win money, girl, and daughter's happiness...

...A last spin of the wheel and we are in Ignazio Silone's Abruzzi—the scene of The Secret of Luca (Harper...

...It is Vailland's thesis that real life is an imitation of the game (or vice versa) and he shows convincingly the exchange of positions of those dictated to and those who are dictators...

...He hasn't the foggiest notion of how to go about spying on people, so he concocts totally false—but surprisingly imaginative—reports which immensely please his superiors in London...

...But he thinks that it will at least buy his daughter a year in a Swiss school, away from the decadent influences that surround her in Havana...

...Yet, his achievements are not inconsiderable...

...But one who does not believe can only think such occurrences are the work of a man who cannot, in the end, face up to the terrible meaning of the ravages which, up to a point, he is able to report so well...

...Since this is only an entertainment Our Man does not drop the hint...

...Thus, like The Quiet American this is a quasi-political novel...

...Somehow it seems that at the last moment Greene's toughness deserts him and he is overwhelmed with pity for the sufferings of his people...

...Suddenly, however, their meaning is baldly stated and relief, almost a deus ex machina, is at hand...

...All this is the long way around of introducing a few comments about his latest work, an entertainment called Our Man in Havana (Viking...

...3.50...

...Holly is nothing more than an Americanized Sally Bowles, the girl Christopher Isherwood made into a lasting symbol of the decadent Berlin of the 1920s...

...The pleasure of the game is that the tables often turn, and he who has been forced to submit to the law gets his chance to force his dictators to submit to it...

...In the end, however, one cannot help but admire the real skill with which Vailland has handled his fascinating symbol and his equally interesting people...

...Up to this point it has been possible for the non-believer to place his own interpretation on the meaning of Greene's symbols...

...Oppressed by the material world, hopeless in the face of forces too large for the individual to comprehend or to cope with, he is another of those people who "give themselves in sacrifice for someone loved...

...Primarily one must admire his statement of the existential situation of modern man in books like The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair...

...In another novel Greene might have left his customary implication that it is the willingness to struggle, along with the very fact of undergoing the struggle's trials, that makes a man a saint...

...All this represents a decent attempt by Greene to broaden his range as a writer...

...Occasionally things seem to work out just a little too patly in his novel, and there are moments when one is convinced that his characters are mere puppets being manipulated by a writer caught in the grip of an interesting, but lifeless, idea...

...Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (Random House...

...But like communism the answer is too simple for the complex questions posed by existence in our time...

...So is the unease of those critics who would like to take him seriously, but who are put off by his slightly disreputable past, and by his continuing interest in such vulgar media as the cinema...

...The salesman soon learns a simple truth: that your identity is what people think it is...

...In due course there is a happy ending...

...is God's love moving through a ravaged world to those that are ravaged...

...Had Capote given us some hint of what meaning his creation has beyond herself he might have written a major novel...

...It obviously represents an attack on the cold war machinations of nations which, because of their insane prejudices and ideologies, must live in an atmosphere of constant suspicion and tension that is anathema to a rational mind...

...In this case it is a foolish daughter...

...It is not pleasant to dwell on the fact that Capote's Holly could easily be made into the same sort of symbol, so let's content ourselves with the notation that the new Capote effort does not make Holly meaningful in terms other than as an "interesting character...

...This represents, it seems, a groping by Silone for a system to replace the communism which he abandoned...

...These disappointed, future-less people, these mass men with some vestigial knowledge, perhaps only a race memory, of the potentialities of humankind are significant figures in the attempt to understand our situation, and Greene's ability to make them achingly real, to make them moving symbolic representations of the fate of man in our time is a thing to be applauded...

...He must give them relief, so God springs to the rescue, giving them at least absolution and possibly sainthood...

...A believer will only note that this dramatically demonstrates "God's love moving through a ravaged world to those who are ravaged...

...It is not a trail-breaking piece of fiction, but of its type it is well worth reading...

...For the moment Greene has deserted religion for politics, thus reversing the customary progression...

...He also has the good taste and the good sense not to proselytize actively for the church's official position on most matters...

...Another returnee is a young leftist political leader who has always been fascinated by the mystery of why Luca refused to defend himself against a charge which, given his almost saintly character, seems to have been false...

...The agent is recalled to London where, although his hoax is discovered, he is given a medal, is allowed to keep the money he bilked from the service, is even given a job training new agents...

...The revelation of the actual details of the long-ago behavior which was motivated by this force seem purely anti-climactic...

...In addition, he gets the girl, an agent London has sent out to help him...

...It is for this reason, I suspect, that so many people who are at least nominally opposed to Catholicism read his work with such interest...

...His masterstroke is to supply them with a set of plans for a new secret weapon which are merely working drawings of one of his vacuum cleaners...

...Its central symbol is a much loved card game...

...It is a little disconcerting to read stories in which the conflict between God and devil for the seedy soul of a Greene hero is delineated in the facile style of a good spy thriller...

...3.50) is a skillful collection of short stories, headed by the title novella, which concerns one Holly Golightly, a wartime playgirl about Manhattan...

...It is not visceral or ceremonial...

...Briefly Noted Roger Vailland's The Law (Knopf...

...It is obvious, fairly early on, that the secret is love...

...Although the moral tow of Our Man in Havana is political rather than religious, it would be wrong to conclude that Greene has totally abandoned his former fictional interests...

...He is, in short, another of Greene's decent little men muddling through a situation too agonizingly difficult for anyone but a saint to cope with...

...3.50), which represents a modest step forward for its writer...

...Before long rival powers are attempting to poison him, the police are suspicious, and innocent friends are being killed because it is suspected that they are fellow conspirators...

...One is even tempted to trot out one of the critical jargon's most overworked phrases— Kafkaesque—for there is an element of sheer madness in the details of the novel's plot...

...His progress from the writing of thrillers (or, as he prefers it, "entertainments") to the writing of serious novels for what George Orwell once unkindly called "the cult of the sanctified sinner" is well known...

...Instead he has given us only a well-written entertainment...

...There is a basic shallowness in Greene which all his metaphysical speculation, all his really first-rate ability to communicate shrewd insights, can't hide...

...For these reasons, I am one of the critics put off by Greene...

...Also present are the qualities that have doomed Greene, right from the start, to the second drawer: the utter lack of genuine stylistic merit, the sketchy way of handling secondary characters, the over-ingenious plot that is motivated more by the facile cleverness of the author's mind than by the psychological inevitability of his characters' behavior...

...In this there is great evidence of Greene's honesty of purpose and a certain tough-minded-ness...

...They are fallen, surely, and in their blundering attempts to do good they often do evil, but there is in all of them a potentiality for redemption, a redemption they often receive at the moment when conventional morality is most ready to damn them...

...Therefore the novel has a rare atmosphere of verisimilitude about it, and Dempsey's dissection of life in America at the turn of the century seems both accurate and sympathetic, neither sentimental nor angry...

...Indeed, his criticism of the emotional believer has always been sharp...

...The pseudo-spy is sure that his deceit will be found out, is half-convinced that he will die as a result of it...

...4.95) is not a brilliantly written book, but it is marked by an honesty of intent and a stubborn desire by its author to avoid the cliches and myths which have been perpetrated by other novels of of the mid-western small town genre...

...But set all that aside for a moment, for the debate about Greene's religious beliefs too often obscures one simple fact: unlike most of the novelists who write for the large audience, Greene has been about the proper business of the novelist—the dissection of the malaise of his times...

...For Greene belief is a matter for intellec-tualization...

...It is usually not apparent until one nears the end of one of his novels...

...What is present is his extremely valid view of modern life and modern man, combined with a new satiric approach that adds a new dimension of insight...

...3.95) is a tautly written, strikingly honest account of the lives of a cross-section of the inhabitants of an Italian village on the Adriatic coast...

...What secret motivated this strange behavior...

...The philosophy of conduct which is based on this is true enough, but Silone can hardly claim much originality in suggesting that if we based all our actions on love the world would be a better place...

...Greene, like his huge middle-brow audience, seems deeply to need the upbeat ending...

...Briefly, it concerns a vacuum cleaner salesman who, needing money, is recruited in slapdash fashion by the British secret service to act as its chief agent in Havana...